The deceased American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell were Israeli spies who used underage girls to blackmail politicians into giving information to Israel,...
Yeah, this is kinda the most reasonable conclusion once you connect the dots (his role acquiring blackmail for intelligence, the sheer amount of different powerful people from different countries implicated, him messing with the money, etc). The real conspiracy theory is the mental gymnastics the official story has to perform.
Right, like I know people shit on leftists for seemingly blaming the CIA for everything bad, but when you view it as a network, it’s hard to not see some obvious connection
The thing that really characterizes liberals to me is their abject failure to consider how multiple different issues are connected in structures that serve functions. In their minds, that whole Epstein case is compartmentalized into its own little bubble, and it doesn't interoperate with other phenomena like current wars, history, electoral politics, corporations, etc etc. But of course, when you start to consider that these things interact with each other (not in one big conspiracy, but as a system that is beyond any individual's control), you look crazy.
Secret CIA Files Say Staffers Committed Sex Crimes Involving Children
Declassified CIA inspector general reports show a pattern of abuse and a repeated decision by federal prosecutors not to hold agency personnel accountable.
The only thing that makes me think they didn't is how most people believe this is the case, and how quickly the "Epstein didn't kill himself" meme spread.
I recognise that it is basically just contrarianism, but it really feels like the CIA wants people to think they killed Epstein. Doesn't mean they didn't of course, but a lot of the discourse around this treats the matter as "settled" when they uncover a conspiracy like this, when it should be just the beginning of looking deeper into it.
but it really feels like the CIA wants people to think they killed Epstein.
but a lot of the discourse around this treats the matter as "settled" when they uncover a conspiracy like this, when it should be just the beginning of looking deeper into it.
Situations like these are called limited hangouts.
When [the intelligence agency’s] veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.
And it worked. “Epstein didn’t kill himself” is now just a personality trait and merchandise slogan on the right. For the few who do connect the dots, they get no assistance from those in the mainstream “investigative journalism” industry who have more resources.
As a result you mostly get circumstantial evidence and blamed as crazy. And unfortunately, a lot of the so called investigators ARE crazy because democrats have completely dismissed the possibility that the Epstein case goes deeper, leaving the republicans to monopolize the conversation. So now you have one side that’s just virtue signaling and muddying the waters with their “independent research” and one side that’s too scared to do anything lest they get associated with the crazies. No one achieves anything of substance, and Epstein and his friends win.
Democrats will tell you straight-faced that JFK was not killed by the CIA or any other US government entity. That it legitimately was a lone gunman acting solely on his own desires. Despite the literal mountains of evidence that the CIA and FBI had every reason to eliminate JFK. They just call that conspiracy theories.
Republicans will probably agree it was some US government entity, so this justifies cutting Medicare and whatever else. Not the CIA and FBI though. Also, when they say the government killed JFK they really just mean "the Jews" somehow. The "fun" part of dismantling right wing hoggery is finding the part where they're just blaming Jews for everything.
What a great fucking country. This all intermingles to make dissent from a position of power impossible at the moment.
I think it's worth noting that the responses from chuds vary wildly. There definitely are some boogaloo type chuds that believe more or less the same thing we do about JFK's assassination, some aren't antisemitic about these things at all. But they still draw the wrong conclusion from it. The important lesson to be learned is that reactionaries often see the same contradictions we do they just resolve them in injust, misguided ways.
I don't necessarily disagree that on a personal level many of them may not care or hold specific antisemitic beliefs about like "Jewish capital" or "Jewish media" those sorts of things which are very explicitly in the realm of Nazis.
But the people on the right who do currently and historically push narratives they buy into and such tend to be antisemitic explicitly or very thinly veiled.
It seems to be one of the problems with rejection of agency propaganda and neoliberalism is it leads you to only a few paths. You can pick up Marxist viewpoints where you see that there is no race or ethnicity controlling everything but rather a self-interested domineering capitalist class. And you can trace back the history with Marx holding your hand and see that this is very probably the truth of it. He nailed it back in the mid 1800s.
Or if you reject Marx because you are racist or find it easier to believe or, probably true for many Americans, you were told by literally every institution growing up that Marx was a fraud and communism sucks blah blah. Then maybe you see similar observations "all these people are hoarding wealth and knocking off world leaders" and someone else helps nudge in the puzzle piece of "how many of them are Jewish?" Without any real grounding in real history, without a proper analysis of capitalism and neoliberalism now days and their effects on liberal democracies, it's easier to lean into the available racist theories and remain ignorant of exploitation, primitive accumulation and such.
OR the rarest breed of right winger. the ones who aren't racist, do understand a Marxist view of the world and then actively choose to be on the side of capital. Like they invert the entire point of reading Capital. Maybe they're cynical and see this as inevitable so someone might as well profit and it should be them. I say these types are rare because while maybe a lot of republican types might ascribe to some ideology along those lines, just by the numbers most are not capitalists, they're just wage laborers with a backwards view of things.
So I guess overall, maybe a lot of them don't actively know they hold racist beliefs, but if you ask them "why?" enough times down the rabbit from "why JFK?" it will lead, probably, to a controlling group of wealthy people and if you into that with them I don't imagine the outcome will be not-racist, I'll just say. Because fundamentally right wingers love private property, they think accumulating wealth is fine and ethical, etc. so the capitalists as described by Marx can't be a nefarious class just as they are. They have to have some special element that makes them "actually bad" because random Joe Republican wants to accumulate $1B too. But he thinks he's the good guy. So how can he condemn this guy who does have $1B? Well, he's Jewish or Arab or Chinese, etc. and those immutable traits explain, to them, why those capitalists are evil and bad and doing conspiracies, but also, some capitalists like Trump, Peter Theil, Elon, can be good.
I think how we should characterize this is something like "they are anti-Semitic in form, but not about Jews specifically" or anti-Semitic in form but not content"
Anti-Semitism, according to Sartre and many others, would've created the object to which it must attach even if it weren't Jews. I don't know many right-wingers who would ever attach their theories specifically to Jews (though it is unfortunately not rare). Many honestly have no signified to attach these ideas too, which is dangerous, but many have "gays" or "black people" or especially now "Chinese" to whom they attach this anti-Semitic form to give it content.
Anti-Semitism's form was never limited to anti-Semitic content, but it was very common that they came together.
Or maybe we need a new word for the content, because treatment of Chinese influence is constantly trending towards the exact forms and similar contents to how Jews were treated in the late 19th century
maybe some more specific form of "essentialism," where behaviors that spring out of class antagonisms and power are instead attributed to immutable attributes of the people who perform them.
"to the ones who perform them" can you elaborate on this part? I guess the question hinges here: are you referring to essentializing the behaviours of "judeo-bolsheviks" in the positive sense? Like all Jews were essentialized to the traits of some socialist Jews in the Soviet union (doing good things but bad for empire)? Or is the claim that anti-Semitism essentialized the negative behaviours of "money hoarding" which some Jews may have done to all Jews? I think this is important to clarify what real actions were done and which were never done/not necessarily done by any of the people essentialized
What you said about how they'll switch up Jews for any other group and rationalize the behavior they're thinking about in terms of stereotypes about that group instead of systemic criticism. Like, blaming cheap Chinese products' poor quality on Chinese people being inherently sloppy instead of the realities of mass production and industrialization.
Maybe I would add that these stereotypes are often based in behaviours that are often also mythical (Chinese products being cheaper made isn't necessarily true)
Occam’s razor here
The CIA killed Epstein. Not memeing
Yeah, this is kinda the most reasonable conclusion once you connect the dots (his role acquiring blackmail for intelligence, the sheer amount of different powerful people from different countries implicated, him messing with the money, etc). The real conspiracy theory is the mental gymnastics the official story has to perform.
Right, like I know people shit on leftists for seemingly blaming the CIA for everything bad, but when you view it as a network, it’s hard to not see some obvious connection
The thing that really characterizes liberals to me is their abject failure to consider how multiple different issues are connected in structures that serve functions. In their minds, that whole Epstein case is compartmentalized into its own little bubble, and it doesn't interoperate with other phenomena like current wars, history, electoral politics, corporations, etc etc. But of course, when you start to consider that these things interact with each other (not in one big conspiracy, but as a system that is beyond any individual's control), you look crazy.
Secret CIA Files Say Staffers Committed Sex Crimes Involving Children
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/cia-employees-sex-crimes-children-secret-files-foia
CIA and Mossad might as well be the same agency with how tightly they are linked by mutual interests.
The only thing that makes me think they didn't is how most people believe this is the case, and how quickly the "Epstein didn't kill himself" meme spread.
I recognise that it is basically just contrarianism, but it really feels like the CIA wants people to think they killed Epstein. Doesn't mean they didn't of course, but a lot of the discourse around this treats the matter as "settled" when they uncover a conspiracy like this, when it should be just the beginning of looking deeper into it.
Situations like these are called limited hangouts.
And it worked. “Epstein didn’t kill himself” is now just a personality trait and merchandise slogan on the right. For the few who do connect the dots, they get no assistance from those in the mainstream “investigative journalism” industry who have more resources.
As a result you mostly get circumstantial evidence and blamed as crazy. And unfortunately, a lot of the so called investigators ARE crazy because democrats have completely dismissed the possibility that the Epstein case goes deeper, leaving the republicans to monopolize the conversation. So now you have one side that’s just virtue signaling and muddying the waters with their “independent research” and one side that’s too scared to do anything lest they get associated with the crazies. No one achieves anything of substance, and Epstein and his friends win.
And that's 1000% intentional
Ah, thanks for that insight. As a non-American I wasn't even aware this had become politicized along party lines like that.
Democrats will tell you straight-faced that JFK was not killed by the CIA or any other US government entity. That it legitimately was a lone gunman acting solely on his own desires. Despite the literal mountains of evidence that the CIA and FBI had every reason to eliminate JFK. They just call that conspiracy theories.
Republicans will probably agree it was some US government entity, so this justifies cutting Medicare and whatever else. Not the CIA and FBI though. Also, when they say the government killed JFK they really just mean "the Jews" somehow. The "fun" part of dismantling right wing hoggery is finding the part where they're just blaming Jews for everything.
What a great fucking country. This all intermingles to make dissent from a position of power impossible at the moment.
I think it's worth noting that the responses from chuds vary wildly. There definitely are some boogaloo type chuds that believe more or less the same thing we do about JFK's assassination, some aren't antisemitic about these things at all. But they still draw the wrong conclusion from it. The important lesson to be learned is that reactionaries often see the same contradictions we do they just resolve them in injust, misguided ways.
I don't necessarily disagree that on a personal level many of them may not care or hold specific antisemitic beliefs about like "Jewish capital" or "Jewish media" those sorts of things which are very explicitly in the realm of Nazis.
But the people on the right who do currently and historically push narratives they buy into and such tend to be antisemitic explicitly or very thinly veiled.
It seems to be one of the problems with rejection of agency propaganda and neoliberalism is it leads you to only a few paths. You can pick up Marxist viewpoints where you see that there is no race or ethnicity controlling everything but rather a self-interested domineering capitalist class. And you can trace back the history with Marx holding your hand and see that this is very probably the truth of it. He nailed it back in the mid 1800s.
Or if you reject Marx because you are racist or find it easier to believe or, probably true for many Americans, you were told by literally every institution growing up that Marx was a fraud and communism sucks blah blah. Then maybe you see similar observations "all these people are hoarding wealth and knocking off world leaders" and someone else helps nudge in the puzzle piece of "how many of them are Jewish?" Without any real grounding in real history, without a proper analysis of capitalism and neoliberalism now days and their effects on liberal democracies, it's easier to lean into the available racist theories and remain ignorant of exploitation, primitive accumulation and such.
OR the rarest breed of right winger. the ones who aren't racist, do understand a Marxist view of the world and then actively choose to be on the side of capital. Like they invert the entire point of reading Capital. Maybe they're cynical and see this as inevitable so someone might as well profit and it should be them. I say these types are rare because while maybe a lot of republican types might ascribe to some ideology along those lines, just by the numbers most are not capitalists, they're just wage laborers with a backwards view of things.
So I guess overall, maybe a lot of them don't actively know they hold racist beliefs, but if you ask them "why?" enough times down the rabbit from "why JFK?" it will lead, probably, to a controlling group of wealthy people and if you into that with them I don't imagine the outcome will be not-racist, I'll just say. Because fundamentally right wingers love private property, they think accumulating wealth is fine and ethical, etc. so the capitalists as described by Marx can't be a nefarious class just as they are. They have to have some special element that makes them "actually bad" because random Joe Republican wants to accumulate $1B too. But he thinks he's the good guy. So how can he condemn this guy who does have $1B? Well, he's Jewish or Arab or Chinese, etc. and those immutable traits explain, to them, why those capitalists are evil and bad and doing conspiracies, but also, some capitalists like Trump, Peter Theil, Elon, can be good.
I think how we should characterize this is something like "they are anti-Semitic in form, but not about Jews specifically" or anti-Semitic in form but not content"
Anti-Semitism, according to Sartre and many others, would've created the object to which it must attach even if it weren't Jews. I don't know many right-wingers who would ever attach their theories specifically to Jews (though it is unfortunately not rare). Many honestly have no signified to attach these ideas too, which is dangerous, but many have "gays" or "black people" or especially now "Chinese" to whom they attach this anti-Semitic form to give it content.
Anti-Semitism's form was never limited to anti-Semitic content, but it was very common that they came together.
Or maybe we need a new word for the content, because treatment of Chinese influence is constantly trending towards the exact forms and similar contents to how Jews were treated in the late 19th century
"to the ones who perform them" can you elaborate on this part? I guess the question hinges here: are you referring to essentializing the behaviours of "judeo-bolsheviks" in the positive sense? Like all Jews were essentialized to the traits of some socialist Jews in the Soviet union (doing good things but bad for empire)? Or is the claim that anti-Semitism essentialized the negative behaviours of "money hoarding" which some Jews may have done to all Jews? I think this is important to clarify what real actions were done and which were never done/not necessarily done by any of the people essentialized
What you said about how they'll switch up Jews for any other group and rationalize the behavior they're thinking about in terms of stereotypes about that group instead of systemic criticism. Like, blaming cheap Chinese products' poor quality on Chinese people being inherently sloppy instead of the realities of mass production and industrialization.
Ah yes, ok good, then of course comrade!
Maybe I would add that these stereotypes are often based in behaviours that are often also mythical (Chinese products being cheaper made isn't necessarily true)